With the rest of the court she gets baptized as a political gesture, woven into the warp and weft of power in the island of Britain. At the age of eleven she discovers the usefulness of coinage, and buys herself a slave. At Tynemouth she is nearly killed and uses her newly gifted seax in terror, for the first time. Modern reproduction of a 9thC Viking seaxĪt the age of nine she goes on tour with the king as he visits his client thegns all over northern England to collect his tribute and remind them of his power. Without Breguswith’s skills as a politician, negotiator, manipulator and poisoner, Hild would never have been in the right place to impress the king, and become his soothsayer niece at the age of seven. She’s intelligent, the brightest mind of her day, which she inherited from her formidable and ruthless mother Breguswith. She is a magnificent creation, a wholly believable person. Hild prophesies to the king by observing the birds and the weather, listening to slave information, and using her common sense and sense of pattern in the strands of power that weave themselves all over the fractured territories of Britain.

Hild is dominated by the character of Hild herself, the pre-teen seer to Edwin, overking of the Anglisc. It’s also, finally, passionate fiction: a novel of loneliness, fear, love, desire and joy in living, and surviving. It’s glorious fiction because the story is an epic, telling how a fatherless girl can thrive in a brutal masculine society simply because she understands how people think, and how politics works, and because she has realised, alone of all her kin, that reading means access to information, which means power. It’s intelligent fiction, based on copious quantities of research into all aspects of Anglo-Saxon life. It’s feminist fiction: the lead protagonist and most impressive character is a girl, and the most powerful people in her story are her mother, her nurse and her maid, three strong women whom she cannot fool.

It’s historical fiction, set in the Anglo-Saxon and British seventh century. Hild is complex and yet straightforward, like life. I was a huge fan of Nicola Griffith’s first two novels, Ammonite and Slow River, but had unaccountably lost sight of her writing until a year ago, when I heard that this novel was on its way. Several weeks later, I began it for a third time, because I simply couldn’t get the story out of my head, and wanted to get back into Hild’s world. Being gobbled alive by a story isn’t so uncommon, but needing to go back and be gobbled up all over again only hours later is a mark of something exceptional. By Sunday afternoon I had started reading it all over again. I was subliminally resentful for days until I finished it, finally, at 3am on a Sunday morning. It’s also the most absorbing and addictive story I’ve read in years. Hild, Nicola Griffith’s sixth novel, is very long and very detailed.

Hild book review